Hi all, school is out and homeschool is in. If you followed any of our previous saga, it is all resolved and DS7 will be attending his private gifted school again next year. But until then we need to keep busy for the summer and keep up the structure so that his transition back into school in the fall will be smoother. And for us, that means following a schedule and doing seatwork daily.
I have the schedule all worked out and we did it today and it went great. DS was totally cooperative and we had a wonderful time together. But I am running into a significant problem as far as teaching him math goes. It happened rather abruptly and I was thoroughly unprepared, but DS has passed me in math ability. He answers questions so fast that I can't keep up, even with a calculator. He understands what to do in word problems when I can't even come up with an equation. I often can't understand how he got the answer or why what he did works.
The other day he had to multiply 2.5 by 24 and he multiplied 5 by 12 to get the answer and I couldn't figure out why he thought he could just halve one and double the other. I kinda get it now, but I have no idea how he would just know to do such a thing. It's not a big problem, but I can't keep up and often tell him he is doing things wrong when he is actually just able to understand better than I am.
He is also doing pretty tricky word problems, like (this is from Khan Academy): When Vlad moved into his new home a few years ago, there was a young oak tree in his backyard. He measured it once a year and found that it grew by 26 cm each year. 4.5 years after he moved into the house, the tree was 292 cm tall. How tall was the tree when Vlad moved into the house? How many years passed from the time Vlad moved in until the tree was 357 cm tall? He did that one in moments while I had to actually write stuff down and solve it step by step.
Yesterday he did a similar problem that related to rate of completion % that he got right and I could not figure out. Because it was a percent you had to divide by the rate to get the total time after finding the difference between the 2 percents and the rate of 2.2. I thought you would have to multiply, but I guess because it was % you don't? I feel like I confuse him and have become detrimental to his math progress. I also feel exceedingly stupid.
Should I just give up on doing math with DS? He obviously doesn't need to learn any more math right now, but it is one of his favorite subjects. He especially enjoys working through world of math on khan academy lately. He wants to get to 100% (lol) and is working hard at it. I guess I could just let him work independently, but for a lot of the stuff he needs instruction. Plus his mouse and keyboard skills are poor, so I usually do that part while he maths. He has mastered 4th grade and made good progress on 5th-8th and has over 50% mastery on pre algebra. He's also doing well at geometry and even has about 10% in trig. The highest I ever went in math was algebra and geometry in high school and then college algebra and 2 statistics courses in college. I got C's in all of them. I feel uniquely unqualified to teach math to DS
What have other people done when (and if) their kids have surpassed them in math? His high ability in the area combined with my low ability is something I always knew would be a problem, I just didn't expect it to happen so soon. If he were older I'm sure there would be other things he could do to exercise his math brain like math contests or something. He could also use the computer to learn independently (I won't let him use the internet yet).
We also just got his spring map results in and he went up 9 points in math to 239. I'm pretty sure that is a quite high score, but I'm not sure exactly what it actually means. I know I can look at it against the norms, but the average student isn't even meeting grade standards, so I don't think it will tell me anything about grade equivalents.
So, yeah, I just want him to be able to have fun doing math, but I want to be able to understand it and help him with it if he is having trouble. I guess I'm looking for something that is somewhat brain expanding and interesting and mathy, but not requiring a great facility with numbers or the ability to do complex word problems. I want to interest and challenge him, but without moving past my limited math skills. Maybe something like that exists? Or maybe I should just give up on math instruction and leave it up to the school when he returns in the fall? I'd hate for him to lose his passion for math, so I tend to want to keep up the fun of always exploring and learning new concepts. Thoughts?
